Sunday, February 15, 2015

Is Religion Good or Evil?

By Rudy Barnes, Jr.

At
the National Prayer Breakfast on February 5, 2015, President Obama generated a
flurry of commentary when he suggested that religions could be the source of
evil as well as good and related ISIS to Islam, something Islamic nations have
taken care to avoid. It brought to mind
Karen Armstrong’s recent book, Fields of Blood, in which she made an
impressive argument to exonerate religion as the cause of the evils of war (see
the blog on Religion, Violence and
Military Legitimacy posted on December 29, 2104).

E.J.
Dionne commented on the prayer breakfast and noted that the President affirmed the
obvious when he said, “We’ve seen professions of faith used both as an
instrument of great good, but also twisted and misused in the name of evil.” And when he condemned the Islamic State as “a
brutal vicious death cult that in the name of religion carries out unspeakable
acts of barbarism ...claiming the mantle of religious authority for such
actions.” Obama cautioned Christians not
to “get on our high horse” and to “remember that during the Crusades and
Inquisitions people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.” He could have also cautioned Jews, since the story
of Joshua at Jericho set a Biblical precedent for ethnic cleansing.

Richard
Cohen ignored historical precedents that associate evil with religion and
argued that ISIS atrocities are not religious but caused by a universal force
of evil that is totally detached from Islam.
Cohen cited the fact that ISIS terrorists are Sunni Muslims like
many if not most of their victims. He failed
to recognize that intrafaith sectarian differences can generate as much religious
hatred and violence—the essence of evil—as interfaith differences.

Michael Gerson used political considerations to detach evil from religion, citing the
“Bush/Obama approach [in which] terrorism is an aberration that must be
isolated [from religion]” and Gerson recalled George W. Bush saying, “I believe that
Islam is a great religion that preaches peace.…And I believe that people who
murder the innocent to achieve political objectives aren’t religious
people.” The problem with that reasoning
is that Islam makes no distinction between religious and political objectives;
but even in Western cultures that distinction can be blurred, as with Christian
right-to-life zealots who kill abortion doctors.

Eugene
Robinson took the President to task for suggesting that Islam needs a
Reformation or Enlightenment to conform its ancient laws to modern standards of
legitimacy, and said that “…comparing the depredations of the Islamic State
with those of the Crusaders is patronizing in the extreme,” implying that
Muslims are “slow learners” when it comes to distinguishing between God’s will
to do good and Satan’s will to do evil.

Whether
patronizing or not, Islam needs to follow the example of Judaism and
Christianity and embrace the libertarian political ideals and reason of the
Enlightenment to be compatible with modernity.
That would amount to a Reformation of Islam, and it would have to begin
with the law. Muslims consider Islamic
law, or Shari’a, as God’s immutable law, and use apostasy and blasphemy laws to
protect the sanctity of Islam. The
prohibitions of Shari’a conflict with the fundamental freedoms of religion and
expression and also deny women and religious minorities the equal protection of
the law.

Michael
Gerson acknowledged that Islamic law is problematic: “It is harder to separate
divine law from positive law in a faith
where the founder was also a political and military leader.” Gerson urged that Presidential rhetoric on
this contentious issue of legitimacy “should not be theological but
phenomenological” and should characterize the conflict with ISIS as the peaceful people versus the terrorists
rather than the peaceful people versus
the radical Islamist terrorists to avoid causing “…a global firestorm.”

It
is a mistake to deny that Islam has a role in motivating the terrorism of al
Qaeda and ISIS; but it is also a mistake to believe that mainstream Islam
supports such terrorism, even as an increasing number of young disaffected
Muslims are attracted to ISIS. Islam,
like Judaism and Christianity, includes great diversity of believers. A primary objective of the ISIS Jihad is to
polarize Jews and Christians against Muslims, creating the fear that Islam is
threatened. Such religious polarization
must be resisted. Only Muslims can determine
the future of Islam, but Jews and Christians can support progressive Muslims in
their battle with radical Islamists for the heart of Islam by engaging in interfaith
dialogue that seeks to reconcile these Religions of the Book on common values,
while acknowledging their differences.

Is religion good or evil? The President got it right when he said it
can be both. God’s will is to reconcile
and redeem while Satan’s will to divide and conquer, and Satan does a superb
imitation of God and does some of his best acting in the synagogue, church and
mosque. But God’s good can prevail over
Satan’s evil if people of faith put love for their neighbor—including their
unbelieving neighbors—over condemning and trying to convert them. If Jews, Christians and Muslims promote
religious reconciliation rather than division, it will help the forces of good
overcome those of evil, and in the process vindicate religion as a source of
good, not evil.

Notes
and References:

Related blogs are Religion, Violence and Military Legitimacy
posted December 29, 2104, and Promoting Religion through Evangelism:
Bringing Light or Darkness? posted February 8, 2015.

Michael Gerson, Step Up the War Against ISIS, not the
Rhetoric Against Islam, Washington Post, February 9, 2015:http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/condemning-islam-is-the-wrong-course/2015/02/09/b4eb521e-b085-11e4-854b-a38d13486ba1_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions&wpmm=1